Traditional employee recognition comes from managers. So a company without managers could also mean a company without any employee recognition. And when employees don’t feel valued, they leave. Plain and simple. So how does a Holacratic organization practice recognition?

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Springest is a website that compares training programs and courses so people can find a training program that fits their learning style, needs, and budget. They were also the first company in the Netherlands to implement the Holacracy principle — an organizational structure that distributes authority to each team member by eliminating job titles in order to increase efficiency.

We spoke with Springest’s founder, Ruben Timmerman, about how his organization leverages peer-to-peer recognition to ensure his people feel valued at work so they will stick around for the long haul.

Q: Why is employee recognition important to your company's culture?

A: Being valued makes people more productive. Also, we are extremely transparent, and we're always critical of each other's work, always striving for improvement. Everything we do is data driven, and that makes it easy to overlook the [person behind the] project. So it's extra important that we address that explicitly with a tool like TINYpulse’s Cheers for Peers feature.

Q: How has Cheers for Peers improved your company's retention rate?

A: Anecdotal evidence suggests people love getting and giving Cheers.

Q: How do you think changing generational dynamics (e.g. the increase in millennials in the workplace) affects the need for recognition and how it will affect retention?

A: Millennials like to work hard, are very self-motivated, and need transparency. This is awesome news for employers, but managers are also prone to taking all the hard work for granted when people do need the recognition.

Q: How do you leverage TINYpulse to get the most out of peer-to-peer recognition?

A: By making all the reports open to everyone, sharing them on our internal channels, and having the Happiness Score as a key performance indicator that's reviewed monthly alongside other metrics like revenue, conversion rate, etc.

Q: What's the one piece of advice you'd give to managers on how they should implement employee recognition in the workplace to improve retention?

A: Don't overestimate your current recognition; you cannot have enough of it.